


Something so Right

by Need_To_Comment_Rising



Series: Grad School AU [3]
Category: Cats - Andrew Lloyd Webber
Genre: Ace characters written by an aroace person, Alternate Universe - Human, Asexual Character, Asexual Demeter, Asexual Relationship, Can Be Read As Either Romantic Or Queerplatonic, Demisexual Munkustrap, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Figuring out your sexuality (or lack thereof), Friends to Lovers, Internalized Acephobia, It spans ten years I think it qualifies as slow burn, M/M, Mentions of asexual characters having sex, No Sex, Polyamory Negotiations, Sexuality Crisis, Slow Burn, blink-and-you'll-miss it Demeter/Tugger, referenced Tuggoffelees
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:22:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27857509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Need_To_Comment_Rising/pseuds/Need_To_Comment_Rising
Summary: Figuring out your feelings for your best friend is already hard enough without throwing asexuality into the mix.-----Two times Munkustrap asked Demeter out and once he didn't need to.
Relationships: Alonzo/Munkustrap (Cats), Demeter & Munkustrap (Cats), Demeter/Munkustrap (Cats)
Series: Grad School AU [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1861531
Comments: 11
Kudos: 19





	1. As a joke

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Work betaed by the incredible [ hearth-goddess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearth_goddess/pseuds/hearth_goddess).
> 
> This story is fully written, I just thought it would work better as a three-parter; so you can expect the other two chapters to be up in the next few days (as soon as I finish editing the last details). 
> 
> The title comes from Paul Simon's "Something so Right", because I misremembered the lyrics and thought they fit well (spoiler: they don't, but I like the title anyway).
> 
> English is not my first language, so if you see something that isn't correct, don't hesitate to tell me!!

_« The dubious neutral ground between love and friendship may be long and safely trodden, until he who stands upon it is suddenly called upon to recognise the authority of the one or the other power; and then it most frequently happens, that the party who for years supposed himself only a friend, finds himself at once transformed into a lover. »_

Walter Scott, "The Pirate".

It started off as a joke.

Demeter had met Munkustrap through his brother, Tugger, when she had joined the Rum Tum Tugger’s Rock Band in her last year of high school. The older Deuteronomy didn’t play, but as they rehearsed in their garage, he used to come down with snacks whenever he felt like taking a break from his studies. It wasn’t love at first sight; hell, it wasn’t even _friendship_ at first sight. Indeed, Demeter’s first thought when she saw him coming down the stairs in a button-down carrying a tray of Arabic sweets and cold mint tea was ' _who is this dork?_ ' and Munkustrap’s first impression of the spiked-haired, combat-booted punk sitting behind the drums was ' _oh, the new one looks scary_ '.

It didn’t take long for them to bond, though. They were still very different people, of course: she was brash and aggressive, he was soft-spoken and caring; she preferred punk and heavy metal, he listened mostly to folk and indie; she was at her best when taking direct action while he excelled at calmly talking people over to his point of view. Their debates, although always friendly, became legendary: they could pick a subject seemingly at random and argue back and forth for hours. But they also found quickly that they had a lot in common. They both struggled with being second generation immigrants; they enjoyed board games; they knew how to ballroom dance; they were deeply passionate about human rights and global justice; they had the same sense of humor. Seeing them at the canteen rolling on the floor with laughter at some stupid joke soon became as commonplace as seeing them in a heated debate over some world news.

Some time before the end of the year, Demeter started dating Tugger. Sadly, although the idea might have looked good on paper, the experiment didn’t go well. Their relationship was a complete disaster, and for a long time the only good thing to come of it was a funny story to tell at after-Pride get-togethers. Indeed, not even a month had passed since the beggining of their romance when Tugger broke up with her, admitting that the whole ordeal had just reaffirmed him that he was, in fact, gay. And it would have been very insulting, if the way he described what having sex with her felt like ( _not bad, per se, but nothing I wouldn’t exchange for a concert or a massage_ ) didn’t ring so true with her that she immediately decided that she must be a lesbian too.

It was because of that incident, too, that she discovered what the rumor mill had been saying about her for a while. One day, when she was changing after a sport class, she was cornered by a girl from the unofficial Tugger’s fanclub, who accused her of breaking the rocker’s heart. According to her, she had cheated on him with his older brother, causing their breakup. Demeter found the mere idea so ridiculously hilarious that she didn’t even have the presence of mind to refute her.

* * *

That night, when she told the Deuteronomy brothers what had happened to her, Tugger exploded in guffaws at the absurdity of the notion, but Munkustrap only smirked, looking thoughtful.

"You know, I see the potential for a great prank here… They aren’t going to believe us if we say it isn’t true, even less now that she has confronted you and you haven’t rushed to defend yourself. At least, not without completely changing the way we interact." He pulled a face at the idea. Demeter agreed; considering some of the things the other girl had considered 'proof' of her sleeping with Munk (they 'talked to much', 'had too many inside jokes', ‘she always knew where to find him', 'someone had seen them dancing a waltz once'), they would have to act like strangers for the rumors to calm down. "So what would happen if we took the exact opposite route?" Munkustrap continued. "How far do you think we can take this before people start realizing it’s an act?"

Demeter snickered, and mulled it over for a minute. She liked the idea. It could be very fun to mess with people like that. Yes, it would give her a bad reputation, but did she really care about whether the narrow-minded people at her high school considered her a 'slut'? She was going to be out of there in a few months anyway, and it wasn’t like she had any intention of keeping in touch with them. Although, there might be a small problem that Munkustrap hadn’t considered…

"I’m all up for it if you are! But wouldn’t that give _you_ a bad reputation? I mean, I don’t care about me, honestly it might be an added bonus, but what about you? Wouldn’t people thinking you are dating me keep you from finding someone?"

Munkustrap shrugged. "If I feel like I want to date someone, you’ll be the first one to know, don’t worry. Going by past experience, though, I don’t think you have to worry about that too much." he added, smiling in his usual self-deprecating way. He turned to his brother, who was still crackling from where he had sprawled on the couch. "What about you, Tugs? It might hurt your Casanova image... Are you up for playing the heartbroken ex who is putting a brave face for the sake of the band?"

Tugger looked up from the sofa, clutching at his heart, a melodramatic expression of profound pain on his face. "Don’t you dare talk to me, you backstabbing bastard. I don’t understand why I haven’t defied you to a duel over my lady’s honour already. It must be my charming personality and forgiving nature." He waved a hand in a magnanimous gesture, before turning and pointing an accusing finger at Demeter, who rolled her eyes fondly at his antics. "And you! You ungrateful wench, how could you? How could you leave me for the clearly inferior sibling?" Sobering a bit, he added "I draw the line at disturbing the band, though. I don't want this to create in-group drama, ok? We have to tell them, at least. But as long as it doesn’t hurt the band, I’m in. It is going to be so much fun, I’m dying to see what my fanclub thinks of the whole affair..."

As the punk girl nodded in agreement (the band was very important to her too, she wasn’t going to let a stupid prank endanger it), Munkustrap clapped his hands. "Well, if the ‘clearly superior sibling’ agrees, it is decided! So, my dearest Demeter, will you do me the honour of being my girlfriend?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you liked this! As always, Kudos and Comments are very appreciated.
> 
> A few comments and notes:  
> \- Although it is never explicitly stated, Demeter is half-Greek in this, and Tugger and Munkustrap are Maghrebi immigrants (I headcanon Munk and Tugger to have arrived to France around four and five years old).  
> \- If you want an idea of what Tugger's band sounds like, I'm inspired by the Libanese band [ Jadal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxUp9bV0TBY), which has a mix of Middle Eastern music and hard rock (or at least by their heavier stuff). Just imagine them singing in French instead of Arabic.


	2. As a defense mechanism

As it turned out, the answer to the question 'how far can we take this before people realize it’s an act' was 'limits don’t exist'. They had decided they wouldn’t outright lie, and they wouldn’t do anything that made one of them uncomfortable; so they mostly just acted like they usually did, but ramping it up to eleven and wording it in the most incriminating way possible. Watching a movie in her room became 'a fun time in your bed'. Mr. and Mrs. Kalifatidis became 'the in-laws'. They started saying 'it’s a date!' whenever they agreed on a meeting-point. She started calling him ‘ _matia mou_ ’, he responded with ‘ _habibti_ ’ (Tugger almost had a laughing fit when he first heard that one). But no matter how much they hammed the sarcasm, nobody seemed to notice it. There were a bewildering few months.

Then, university arrived; and with that transition came a whole new set of experiences. As a Sociology student with her views on Gender Studies, Demeter found herself, for the first time in her life, in no shortage of queer people to surround herself with. So, as a newly discovered lesbian, she threw herself into the dating scene, looking for that spark that everyone told her she would feel when she finally found ‘her type’.

But that spark never came. No matter what she did, who she hooked up with, gender, sexuality, whether they were strangers at a bar or people she had good friendships with, nothing seemed to click. Kissing was nice and all, but the rest of it felt artificial, like it was too much work for the rewards it provided. She found herself getting distracted during sex, her mind wondering to her homework, or wanting to get it over with and just cuddle. And that was the best case scenario: in some memorable cases, something her partner had done or said, although perfectly innocuous in theory, had sent her into a downward spiral that had ended with her curled in a corner trying to get her bearings back. Some of her partners took it very badly, considering it an insult to their attractiveness and skills, while others got concerned and tried to psychoanalyze her; and she soon became very proficient at giving head, as it provided her with a way to please her partners without getting her own body involved in the process.

After a while, though, she couldn’t flee from the realization any longer. Sex just didn’t do it for her. But why? _Everyone_ enjoyed sex, right? So what was wrong with her? She went to a gynecologist: everything worked fine. She spent hours going through her memories, trying to find something, anything, that could have triggered a mental block: she found nothing. She briefly thought of finding herself a therapist, as so many people had told her to, but she didn’t have the means to pay for it herself, and this was definitely _not_ a conversation she wanted to have with her parents.

* * *

At last, it was Munkustrap who provided her with the word she needed: asexuality. It was a nice day of January, and they were sitting at one of their favourite bakeries, winding down from a pretty full week after the end of the exams season. At the moment, Demeter was filling her friend in on the events of a post-exams party she had attended a couple of days before.

"… And then, he told me I was a prude! Can you believe it? According to his infinite wisdom, ‘my internalized mysogyny and puritan upbringing have created a disconnect from my own body that impides my pleasure’. I guess the sign of a fully realized woman and a real feminist is the willingness to sit on his dick." she spit the words out in disgust, and paused a moment to take a fierce bite of her pastry and sigh. "Seriously, what an asshole. Thankfully Misto was nearby and he dragged me away before I could break his nose…" she finished.

After that declaration of intentions, they stayed silent for a bit, just enjoying each other’s company. The silence was broken, though, by Demeter, in a tone of voice that couldn’t be more different from the brash, angry one she had been using up until that point. Indeed, her voice was now soft, hesitant, as if she wasn’t even sure she should be talking about it out loud.

"Munk," she started, pausing to lift her eyes from her coffee and fix them on her best friend, "be honest with me. Do you think he might be right? Not in general" she hastly added "that spiel about sexual availability to men being the mark of a true feminist is bullshit and he knows it -he’s just trying to get sex by spouting terms he’s learned in class-. But about me? You know me probably better than anyone else, and I know you won’t lie to me. Am I repressed?"

Munkustrap smiled gently, and put a comforting hand on Demeter’s arm. "Honestly? I think you’re as far from being a prude as you can possibly get. Anyone who has talked to you for more than five minutes knows you have nothing against sex in theory, or even in practice, as long as it doesn’t involve you. Hell, you’ve endured years of Tugger’s exploits, if you were a prude you would have snapped by now!" he chuckled, and Demeter followed, feeling something lighter at the recurring complaint about her lead singer’s habit of recalling his escapades in painful detail. She had pulled the TMI card when he had started dating Misto, though: she didn’t need to know whether or not her classmate was good in bed, thank you very much.

"That said" Munkustrap continued, and her stomach clenched in fear, dreading what he was going to say next. "I was reading a webcomic the other day, and they talked about something that I think might be relevant to this conversation. I thought about sending it to you, but you weren’t online, and then I forgot. Give me a moment, I’ll find it again." He concentrated in his phone for a bit, leaving Demeter to wonder what he could have seen in a webcomic that could be relevant to this. As far as she knew, he avoided media that relied heavily on sex almost as much as she did…

But before she could loose herself in her own thoughts much, he passed her his phone, open on a webpage full of definitions, diagrams and other information. She started reading, growing more and more invested with every new information. She spent a good five to ten minutes scrolling around, clicking on links, going back and forth, under Munkustrap’s amused gaze. When she finally tore her eyes from the device, she looked so relieved she seemed about to cry.

"Shit, Munk. How the _fuck_ have I never heard of this before?? I’m in Sociology, for God’s sake! How is it that I’m learning about this from the normie in Law Studies?" she punctuated it with a playful shove to the guy in front of her, who couldn’t supress a triumphant smirk before sobering up.

"If I’m being completely open here… not so 'normal'. I don't think I'm straight, either. You know, it’s not only because of you that I clicked on that link in the first place. Some of that stuff... it resonated with me too."

Demeter nodded, feeling a little guilty for assuming, but knowing better than to pry. He would give more information when he felt ready, if he wanted to, and she wouldn’t be able to get another word out of him if he didn’t. So instead, she locked the screen of the phone and gave it back to its owner with a small smile.

"Well, look at us, all queer and stuff. Who would have thought? Not our high school classmates, that is for sure!" she reminisced, laughing. "Remember that time when everyone thought we were together? That was fun…"

"It certainly was." agreed Munkustrap with a chuckle. "Useful, too! I don’t think I’ve ever been propositioned less often than when people thought I was dating you…"

Demeter flashed him a toothy grin. "That is because I’m a mean punk and they’d get a knife to the gut if they crossed me" she joked, referencing the rumour that had run rampant in their school after she had gotten in a fight with a bully and he had gotten a few gashes from the spikes in her wristbands. "I can do it again, if you want", she added after a bit. "If you ever need help getting out of a sticky situation, you heartbreaker, I’d be happy to waltz in and play your angry punk girlfriend…"

Munkustrap laughed. "You know, I may take you up on your offer sooner than you expected. There is this girl in my class (you’d hate her, you know, the 'I don’t see why I should pay taxes to Nanny State', 'we need to remember this country’s roots are Catholic and white' crowd), and I’m pretty sure she’s gearing up to ask me out. And I mean, I guess I could go all 'Allah Akhbar' on her, but I'm afraid some of my professors might agree with her, and I’d rather not risk it. So you know, if you could come by one of these days…"

Demeter’s crackle at that was positively evil. "Oh, I’d love to."

With a matching grin that would probably have shocked everyone who used to call him 'that sweet, sweet boy', he reponded. "Well, in that case, if you want to find me after class tomorrow, I finish at six. So, my dearest Demeter," he finished with a flourish, mimicking what he had said years before, "would you do me the honour of being my girlfriend?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few notes and thoughts:
> 
> \- Although I don't think that is the kind of webcomic Munkustrap would be interested in, the "webcomic" incident is a shout-out to the real-life webcomic [ Weregeek ](http://www.weregeek.com/2020/06/04/) which a few months ago had an entire arc about a character figuring out their asexuality, complete with a lot of additional information in the author notes. Thank you for that, Alina!
> 
> -Sadly, I didn't invent the "France is white and Catholic" quote. It comes from an [ interview ](https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2015/09/27/nadine-morano-evoque-la-race-blanche-de-la-france_4773927_823448.html) to a Republican senator from 2015. She was secretary of Labour in 2010-2012. *Sigh*
> 
> \- I've hesitated **a lot** whether this chapter merited an M rating, mostly because of the sentence about giving head. I've finally decided that it didn't, but I'm still not entirely sure. What do you think? Should I change the rating? If yes, would the story without that sentence still merit an M rating?


	3. For real this time

The years passed. The band got a little more traction, while never seeming to break through. Electra, Demeter’s little sister, started a degree in contemporary dance at a prestigious academy. Demeter joined an anarchist union, where she made fast friends with Jenny and Jellylorum, two older women from the gender equality branch. Munkustrap did a summer internship at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and came back with stars in his eyes. Him, Mistoffelees and Demeter finished their respective Masters and went on to their PhDs.

But one thing didn’t change: her friendship with Munkustrap was still smooth, supportive and utterly comfortable. If anything, as they got more and more secure in their identities, it added an additional layer of intimacy between them. It was a relief to have someone you knew would never take your gestures of physical affection for overtures, and they took full advantage of it. Also, whenever someone said something ignorant, Demeter would text him and rant, and Munkustrap sent back asexuality memes he found online.

All in all, the punk was very pleased with her life; she wouldn’t have minded if it had stayed like that forever. But as we all know, wishing for everything to stay the same in a story is the surest way to attract life-changing events. And this one would come in the form of a slinky, charming boy by the name of Alonzo.

They met at a compulsory training that the university organized every year for the new Grad Students. He was new in town, having just arrived from Buenos Aires to work at the new neurobiological project at the Biology Department. He approached their friend group during the coffee break, attracted, as he later confessed, by the sheer amount of Pride pins, patches and other parafernalia they had on them (‘ _Dios los cría y ellos se juntan’_ , as he used to say). At first she wasn’t all that taken in by the guy, because his first move was kissing everyone’s hand and calling her ‘ _bella_ ’, and he reminded her of every sleazeball she had ever encountered; but it soon became clear that he wasn’t trying to pull. Apparently, flirting was just his default mode, his way of communicating with the world. And as someone who used physical touch with no sexual connotations whatsoever, she could get behind that.

Anyway, Alonzo inserted himself in their little friend group with ease, winning over everyone with a mix of easy charm and a willingness to cook whenever the occasion even remotely called for it. Who could say no to free food, especially when he was so generous with the leftovers? Out of all of them, he tended to latch to Demeter at parties, especially when they run late, because her fluency in Spanish meant she could work as a translator whenever he got too tired or too drunk for English. Not that she cared; he was really nice, once you got to know him. But it was obvious to anyone with eyes that she wasn’t the one his heart was bent on. Indeed, even once they discovered most of his flirting didn’t mean a thing, there was still one person who attracted his most suggestive smiles and his slinkiest moves: Munkustrap. Although he was clearly doing his best to keep it from being blatant or overwhelming enough to be uncomfortable, his interest for the straight-laced Law student was as clear as it could possibly be without stating it out loud.

From a safe distance, Demeter followed the story unfold with a worried eye. She kept expecting for her friend to ask her to step in and do her thing, like he had done every other time someone had tried to get in his pants, but the question never came. More and more time passed, and she worried that by the time he would do something about the issue, Alonzo would be too savvy of their dynamic for the ruse to work. What was he playing at?

In the end, Munkustrap did take her aside to ask for her help, but the conversation was nothing like she had expected it to be. He was staying at her place after a game night that had run long, and they had been lounging on her bed for long enough that she was starting to drift off, when he turned to her and opened with one, very jarring, line.

"Dem, I think I’m attracted to Alonzo."

The punk jerked awake. "What?" she sputtered, wondering whether she had misinterpreted something in her doze. "What do you mean, ‘attracted’??"

The other boy flopped on his back, raking his hands through his curls in a manner she had come to associate with failed research hypotheses and long nights trying to understand obscure sources.

"Attracted. Seduced. Enticed. Aroused. Take your pick. All those cringy things allos are always talking about. He makes me feel hot and itchy. I can’t stop looking at his arms and his chest. The other day he was dancing with Cassandra in that way of his, as though he had no spine, and I got hard." He groaned loudly. "This is so embarrassing. How do allos deal with it?" He covered his eyes with his arm, a picture of mortification.

Demeter stared at him, thrown off by this turn of events. If someone had asked her as far as a couple hours ago for a list of sentences Munkustrap would never say, ‘I got hard watching a friend dance’ would be up there with ‘I joined a human trafficking ring’ and ‘death metal is the best music style of all time’. It wasn’t even just that Munk identified as ace: even before they knew the term, in all the time she had known him, he had never, ever, expressed any interest in sex. It had always felt like this was not a subject that concerned him in any way. So her friend suddenly announcing he was sexually attracted to another human being? It was kind of weirding her out.

But she had to keep it contained. This was not about her. Her friend was struggling with this, and he was asking for help, for the first time… possibly ever. Now that she thought of it, Munkustrap was always there when someone needed him, but when it came to his own issues, he dealt with them silently and privately. So to be coming out with this, it had to be eating him alive. She would be there for him now, like he had been there for her so many times now.

So she gently took his hand, pulling it away from his eyes and pressing a soft kiss on his palm. "Okay, so you find Alonzo attractive. It happens. I’m pretty sure you know that isn’t exactly an uncommon reaction. Hell, I’m pretty sure I saw Rumpleteazer checking him out the other day, and she’s as lesbian as they come!" she joked, trying to lighten the mood. At Munkustrap’s pained grimace, though, she immediately sobered up, changing tactics completely.

"I get why it’s weirding you out, though. I’m here for anything you need, you know that. If you ever need to vent, or a soundboard for your thoughts, you can call me." She squeezed his hand, briefly wondering whether she could get away with adding ‘as long as they stay PG’ before deciding against it. This was not the moment to invalidate his feelings in any way.

"What now, then?" she asked carefully. "Do you have any idea of where you want to go from here? If you want to go somewhere..." she hastily added, already mentally browsing through everything she had ever read about grey asexuality. She silently cursed herself for not reading more about it when she was learning about her identity, and she made a mental note to correct that blind spot as soon as she had the chance. It had seemed so obvious to her at the time that those labels were not for them that she had read enough of the basics not to say anything acephobic by mistake and moved on.

"I don’t know, honestly. This is just so… unexpected!" Munkustrap answered, gesturing at himself with his free hand. "Look at me, twenty-five years old and getting attracted to another human being for the first time. Ugh, I feel like I’m validating every douchebag who has ever told us we were just late bloomers." He scrunched his nose in disgust at the notion and continued. "I’m almost tempted to ignore the entire thing, just to make sure I don’t give some acephobic asshole fodder against us..."

At that, Demeter sat up abruptly. Ok, this was a topic she felt a lot more comfortable in. She could handle this. "You will not do such a thing, not on my watch" she threatened, giving him her best fake glare. "Shelve the entire thing if you feel like it, you have no obligation to act on those feelings if you don’t want. But do not let those fuckers dictate how you live your life. One way or the other. If you feel like staying a virgin your entire life, go for it. And if you feel like going out there and getting a piece of that hot ass, you go out and Do. Exactly. That." She punctuated each of the last words with a hard poke to his chest, cheering mentally at the small smile it got from his friend. In an access of tenderness for her noble, self-sacrificing, idiot best friend, she plopped on top of him, wrapping him in her arms and squeezing as hard as she could from the awkward position she was in.

Then, going up on her elbows and looking him dead in the eye, she continued. "And if after the experience you still identify as ace, that’s _all_ that counts. _And_ if you decide that you were really just a late bloomer, that’s fine too. You aren’t giving anyone ‘fodder’." she said hotly, missing having the full use of her hands to wave with, but not willing to give up the eye contact she had created.

"And even if you were" she continued, getting carried away by her own speech, "you should still do it. Not only because you deserve to be happy -which you absolutely do- but also because you are more useful to the cause contradictory and with energy to spare than frustrated and sad, but intellectually faultless. This isn’t about being pure, it’s about fighting back against a system of oppression. And that we can only do together, with collective action and..." she stopped, fake glaring a quietly laughing Munkustrap.

" _What_? What’s so funny?" she snapped, but there wasn’t any heat in her voice. It felt good to see him laugh, even if it was at her expense.

Her friend just shook his head, still chuckling, and lifted one of his hands to cup her cheek. " _God_ , I could kiss you right now", he whispered, his eyes full of emotion. And she should have felt panic, or at least confusion, at the sudden declaration, but instead it just felt _right_. Like it was just the last piece of a puzzle that was years in the making, or maybe just the next turn in the road they were travelling together. So she just leant into his touch, looked into his eyes and whispered back "well, go ahead, then."

* * *

An undetermined amount of time later, Demeter laid back on the bed, feeling well-kissed and warm in a way that had nothing to do with the pijama she was still wearing and all to do with Munkustrap’s body, curled around her like an overly grown cat. "We never finished the conversation, you know" she commented casually, treading her hand through the boy’s curls. "What are you planning to do with Alonzo, then? I’m pretty sure he would be up for it if you propositioned him, to be honest..."  
  
Munkustrap hummed softly and nuzzled at her neck for a minute before rolling onto his back to answer. "That’s one good question. You would be okay with either choice, am I right?" He stole a quick glance in her direction, which she took advantage of to nod encourangly. One of the advantages of dating your best friend (boyfriend? They would have to talk about that later) was that they could skip all the usual relationship-boundaries conversations. They had already had every possible discussion about sexuality, love and everything in between, and knew exactly where the other stood in those matters. Well, except for Munkustrap’s sudden interest in sex with Alonzo, but it wasn’t as though that affected her in any way (during their make-out session she had made a joke about "not putting out before the first date", and Munk had just laughed, swatted her on the arm and answered "I’m still not attracted to you and you _know_ it, you _asshole_.")  
  
Looking pensive, the boy burrowed back against her side and sighed. "I think I might go for it, then. I’m having lunch with him on Friday, maybe that would be a good moment. Should at least give me enough time to explain the whole shebang." Demeter hummed in response, already going through her Friday afternoon schedule in her head. She expected this to go over pretty well (or at least she hoped it would: she wasn’t looking forward to breaking Alonzo’s legs if he hurt Munkustrap), but, just in case, she wanted to be available if he needed a shoulder to cry on afterwards. So she was taken by surpise when it was Munkustrap’s turn to go all fierce and looming over her.  
  
"But there is one thing I want to be clear about" he said, vehemently. "If he isn’t okay with us, in any way shape or form, that’s it. I don’t care how hot he is, or how nice, or how warm he makes me feel inside. You are one of the most important people in my life, and I love you more than I can express, be it platonic, romantic or anything in between. You and I are a package deal, and if he can’t understand that, he can leave right now and never come back" he ended with a protective growl, tearing a suprised laugh out of Demeter. Wow, for her soft-hearted friend to be talking like that, he had to be really serious about it. It was suprisingly heartwarming.  
  
"Oh, come here, you dork", she said, pulling him down on top of her so that she could both give him the biggest hug of his life, and also hide the tears that threatened to spill from her eyes. "I love you too, but I’m way too sleep-deprived for big speeches. Unless you want me to break down on you and start bawling, let’s get some sleep and leave the tearful love confessions for the morning, okay?"  
  
And after a bit of grumbling about her being heartless and some rearranging of limbs, Demeter found herlself staring at the ceiling, a sleeping Munkustrap in her arms and a warm feeling in her heart. Yes, in the morning they would have to talk about this, and what it meant, and whether or not they wanted to go public (Tugger would have a field day, he would never let them live this down). And then Munk was going to ask Alonzo out, and entire other set of boundaries would have to be established. It would not be easy, and it might not work out, but there was no other person she would rather be exploring this with. And with that thought, she held him tight, closed her eyes, and went to sleep, a small, contented smile on her lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And it's DONE! I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I would enjoy reading your reactions if you have any... As usual, kudos make my day, and comments make my _week!_ ;)
> 
> And a few comments for the road:  
> -The great, the magnificent, the amazing gauntletknight [ did a fanart of the scene when the gang met Alonzo](https://is-it-mungojerry-or-rumpelteazer.tumblr.com/post/634446697871867904/if-you-are-still-open-to-prompts-about-the-polyam#notes). It is perfect and I love it. I'm linking to my own tumblr (come say hi!) because that way you also get my response, but go give them some love!  
> \- For anyone who's wondering, the idiom Alonzo is using means "God raises them and they find each other", and it is used to mean that people who are similar will find one another even if they come from very different backgrounds.  
> \- You know? The most difficult part writing this fic was Munkustrap describing sexual attraction. That's what happens when you are ace and you try to write someone being aroused... Let me know if it works and it isn't too much! Do allo guys really get hard from looking at people?
> 
> Thank you again for sticking to this story all the way to the end! I love every one of you, even the people who are just a number on the "hits" case. <3


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